The Eruption of Mount St. Helens: The Untold History of this Cataclysmic Event

Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney, and the features editor of the History News Network (hnn.us). His articles have appeared in HNN, Crosscut, Salon, Real Change, Documentary, Writer’s Chronicle, and others. He has a special interest in the history of conflict and human rights. You can find his other interviews here. His email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

If you’re over age
40 or so and lived in Washington State in 1980, you probably have a
story about the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

On Saturday, May
17, 1980, my wife Betsy and I were married on a bright, warm day in
Spokane, Washington. The following morning, oblivious to any news, we
saw a dark bank of what we thought were thunderhead clouds
approaching Spokane from the southwest.

It
turned out that the inky clouds carried volcanic ash from the 8:33
a.m. eruption of Mount St. Helens, more than 250 miles away. By
afternoon, the Spokane sky was dark as night and a steady downpour of
the powdery ash obscured the sun through the day.

Many
of our wedding guests that Sunday were caught in the blinding ash
storm as they drove west, toward Seattle. Several holed up in motels
or emergency shelters in churches or schools for the day and
sometimes longer.

Our
friends eventually made it home unscathed but that wasn’t the case
for everyone. The massive volcanic blast from Mount St. Helens left
57 people dead, dumped ash on eight U.S. states and five Canadian
provinces, and caused more than a billion dollars of damage.

Acclaimed
author Steve Olson deftly interweaves the history and science of this
cataclysmic event in his groundbreaking new book Eruption:
The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
(Norton). Based on exhaustive research, his book tells the story not
only of the eruption and its toll, but also looks back at economic
and political developments that determined the fate of those near the
mountain when it blew, particularly the cozy relationship of the
powerful Weyerhaeuser lumber company and some government bodies.

Mr.
Olson’s book is a work of investigation as well as vivid
storytelling that takes readers from the world of logging and
railroad barons more than a century ago to the lives of scientists,
loggers, government officials and many others at the time of the
eruption. His book demonstrates how history is a constant presence in
our lives as he illuminates fateful decisions that preceded the
eruption and shares in evocative prose the previously untold stories
of those who perished as well as those who survived this massive
volcanic explosion. Mr. Olson also describes the aftermath of the
eruption: the resilience of nature, scientific advances, policy
changes, and the creation of a national monument—and he shares
ideas on preparedness for natural disasters to come.

Mr.
Olson is a Seattle-based science writer. His other books include
Mapping
Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins,
a finalist for the National
Book Award and recipient of the Science-in-Society Award from the
National Association of Science Writers; Count
Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math
Competition (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin), named a best science book of 2004
by Discover magazine;
and, with co-author with Greg Graffin, Anarchy
Evolution. His
articles have appeared in The
Atlantic Monthly, Science, Smithsonian, The
Washington Post, Scientific
American,
and many other magazines. Mr. Olson also has served as a
consultant writer for the National Academy of Sciences and National
Research Council, the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology, the National Institutes of Health, and many other
organizations.

Mr.
Olson generously responded by email to a series of questions about
his new book on Mount St. Helens.

Robin
Lindley: You’re an accomplished author Steve, and you’ve written
on a wide array of science topics. What inspired you to research and
write about the Mount St. Helens’ eruption of May 1980?

Steve
Olson:
I grew up here in the Pacific Northwest, in a small farming town
about 100 miles downwind of Mount St. Helens, but I went east for
college in the 1970s and stayed there after meeting my future wife in
the back of an English class (though I was a physics major in college
who only later got interested in writing). In 2009, she got a job in
Seattle, so we moved back to my native state. I’d written several
previous trade books on mostly scientific topics, but when we got
here I decided to write a book about the most dramatic thing that had
ever happened in Washington – and the eruption of Mount St. Helens
was the obvious choice.

Robin
Lindley: Where were you when the mountain erupted? Did you know any
people affected by the eruption?

Steve
Olson: On
May 18, 1980, I was living outside of Washington, DC, working as a
freelance science and technology policy writer and editor, and was
three weeks away from getting married. My grandmother, who still
lived in the small town where I grew up, brought a jar of ash that
she’d scraped from her driveway to the wedding as a conversation
starter.

Robin
Lindley: Much has been written about the eruption but you have done
exhaustive research to revisit the history of the mountain and its
explosion. What was your research process and how did the book evolve
from the time you began working on it to its publication?

Steve
Olson: Lots
of previous books had been written about Mount St. Helens, but as I
started doing research on the book I discovered that many parts of
the story had never been written about before. In particular, I got
interested in the 57 people who had been killed by the eruption. Why
were they so close to such a dangerous volcano – some just three
miles away from the summit?

It
turned out that the danger zones were much too close to the mountain,
running along the border between land owned by the Weyerhaeuser
timber company to the west and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to
the east. I decided that I needed to tell why the border was there
and not somewhere else, and that required telling the stories of both
Weyerhaeuser and land use in the western United States.

Robin
Lindley: You set forth the historical context of the eruption in
1980, and the Northwest was a much different place than now, 36 years
later. What are few things you’d like readers to understand about
that time?

Steve
Olson: When
I left the Pacific Northwest in 1974, there was little to keep an
ambitious person who was curious about the world here. Weyerhaeuser
and Boeing were the two big companies in the state. The economy was
stagnant, the culture was idiosyncratic and isolated, and the rest of
the United States seemed far away. All of that began to change in
the 1980s, and the Northwest is now completely different than when I
was growing up – except, of course, for the profound natural beauty
surrounding us on all sides.

Robin
Lindley: How does the violence of the eruption of Mount St. Helens
compare with other volcanic eruptions?

Steve
Olson: In
a global and geological context, the 1980 eruption of Mount St.
Helens was not particularly large.

As
I write in the book, more than 20 larger eruptions have occurred
around the world in the past 500 years. Mount St. Helens has had
much larger eruptions in the past. When Mount Mazama erupted in
Oregon about 7,000 years ago, it released 100 times as much ash as
Mount St. Helens did in 1980 before collapsing to form what is today
Crater Lake. That said, the avalanche that destroyed the northern
flank of Mount St. Helens in 1980 was the largest in recorded human
history (so over the past few thousand years), and the blast that
destroyed 230 square miles of forest and took 57 lives was largely
unexpected by geologists, so it was a major event.

Robin
Lindley: How was the mountain and its vicinity changed by the
eruption? What was the area destroyed by the volcano, flora and fauna
lost, and the amount of ash strewn to the east?

Steve
Olson: The
1980 eruption emitted about a cubic kilometer of ash, which fell
across the United States from Washington to New York State and
eventually traveled all the way around the world on high-altitude
winds. In addition to the people killed, many thousands of animals
in the surrounding forests died, along with almost all the plant life
in the blast zone, including gigantic old growth trees that had been
growing for centuries.

Robin
Lindley: The mountain rumbled and bulged in March and April 1980. Did
scientists predict the lateral blast to the north that actually
occurred by then or were they convinced the mountain would blow out
the top and upward?

Steve
Olson:
They didn’t predict a lateral blast to the north, but they knew it
was possible. Mount St. Helens had blown out to the side before, and
they knew of other volcanoes that had done so. Still, the size of
the blast did take them by surprise. Volcanoes in Russia and in
Japan had erupted laterally, but the size of the devastated zone was
not as great as at Mount St. Helens. However, once Mount St. Helens
erupted that way, volcanologists took a look at deposits by other
volcanoes in the past and realized that the 1980 eruption was not a
geologically unusual event. On the contrary, some volcanic
avalanches and lateral blasts have been much larger.

Robin
Lindley: Your book serves as a tribute to the 57 people lost in the
eruption. You took great pains to collect their stories from archives
and from friends and family members, among others. For you, it seems,
the roots of their demise may rest in the history of logging and
railroads a century earlier? Why is that?

Steve
Olson:
I think of those 57 people as victims of history. Some of the
history was short-term and personal, related to their specific
circumstances and decisions, but other parts of the history that came
into play at Mount St. Helens extended decades or centuries into the
past.

Robin
Lindley: How did Weyerhaeuser acquire vast timberlands in the
Cascades and on the Olympic Peninsula and what was the role of
railroad magnate James J. Hill?

Steve
Olson: To
me, this was the most interesting part of the historical story. As I
said, the danger zone on the western and northwestern sides of the
mountain was drawn along the boundary between Weyerhaeuser land and
the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

How
did Weyerhaeuser, a company formed on the banks of the Mississippi
River in the 19th
century, come to own so much land in southwestern Washington state?
It’s not an overstatement to say that it arose in large part
because Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the German immigrant who started the
company, happened to buy the house in 1891 next to Jim Hill on Summit
Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Hill,
who was the owner and driving force behind the Great Northern Railway
from St. Paul to Seattle, had recently acquired control of the
Northern Pacific Railroad, which was built, starting in 1870, from
Duluth to Tacoma. In the 1890s, Hill wanted to buy the rail line
from Chicago to Burlington, Iowa (which is why it’s called the
Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad today), and needed money to do
so. To raise the money, he sold much of the Northern Pacific’s
land grants in Washington State to his next door neighbor Frederick
Weyerhaeuser, who realized that the forests of the upper Midwest were
being depleted and needed new sources of timber. It’s a rich,
convoluted, intricate history that had direct consequences for the
people around the mountain on May 18, 1980.

Robin
Lindley: Many people may not realize that logging was allowed on the
mountain. What was happening with the Weyerhaeuser operation there at
the time of the eruption? Did logging interests ignore scientists and
the Forest Service on safety?

Steve
Olson: Weyerhaeuser
had been logging the land west of Mount St. Helens hard for the eight
decades before 1980. When the mountain began to shake in March, two
months before the big eruption, the company continued to log its
land, despite the hazards of working near the volcano. If the
mountain had erupted on a weekday rather than a Sunday morning,
hundreds of Weyerhaeuser loggers in the surrounding woods likely
would have died.

Robin
Lindley: What was the role of Washington state and Governor Dixy Lee
Ray in creating danger zones at Mount St. Helens?

Steve
Olson: The
state appears not to have wanted to interfere with Weyerhaeuser’s
operations west of the mountain. The easy way to do that was to
avoid drawing the danger zones on Weyerhaeuser property. The
governor of Washington State in 1980, Dixy Lee Ray, signed the order
establishing the danger zones knowing that they were too small. But
the geologists’ predictions of what the mountain would do were
uncertain, and Ray was the kind of person who believed that people
should simply be sensible enough to stay away from the mountain on
their own. (Though she had toured it several times from aircraft
overhead.)

Robin
Lindley: You believe the people who died and were injured in the
blast got a bad rap as risk takers or scofflaws. What would you like
readers to know about these people?

Steve
Olson: After
the eruption, Dixy Lee Ray insinuated that the people killed in the
eruption were in the danger zones illegally, and Jimmy Carter, who
flew over the blast zone a few days after the eruption, repeated the
accusation. But only 3 of the 57 people killed were in the
designated off-limits zone – and two of them had permission to be
there. The only person in the danger zone illegally was the one
person people tend to remember from the eruption – Harry R. Truman,
who refused to leave his lodge on the south end of Spirit Lake, right
beneath the mountain’s northern flank.

Robin
Lindley: How did most of the deaths occur? Were fatalities caused by
heat or suffocation or burial in ash or other reasons?

Steve
Olson: The
majority of the victims suffocated when they were caught in the blast
cloud, which consisted of ash, hot rock, and volcanic gases. But
others were blown off ridge tops, hit by falling trees, and carried
away by mudflows. The bodies of nearly half the people killed were
never found and remain buried around the mountain.

Robin
Lindley: Lodge owner Harry Truman is probably the best known person
who died in the eruption. Did you learn anything new about the
steadfast and stubborn Mr. Truman?

Steve
Olson:
In the weeks before the eruption and after his death, Harry Truman
was often portrayed by the media as a hero who proudly and defiantly
held out against a nanny state government that wanted to remove him
to safety. But up close the situation was more complicated. Harry’s
presence near the mountain gave other people a bargaining chip to
pressure law enforcement personnel to let them enter the danger
zones, and those who succeeded in getting in are lucky the blast
occurred when it did.

Harry
knew that he was in great danger and was scared of what the mountain
might do to him. But after being built up in the media, he had a
reputation to uphold. Also, he was 83, his wife had died suddenly a
few years before, he was drinking heavily. It’s probably fair to
say that Harry Truman met the fate he would have hoped he would meet.

Robin
Lindley: Was there ever a formal investigation of why people were on
the mountain on May 18 and how the restricted zones were created and
enforced?

Steve
Olson:
There were hearings at which geologists and public officials
testified. But probably the most consequential follow-up was a
lawsuit brought by several families of victims against the state
(which was dismissed) and against Weyerhaeuser. The case against
Weyerhaeuser went to trial in King County in 1985 and ended in a hung
jury. The majority of the jurors were convinced that Weyerhaeuser
was not at fault in not providing its employees with more information
about the dangers of working so close to the mountain, but a solid
minority disagreed. Instead of insisting upon a new trial, the
families settled for a small amount of money, saying that their
intention was more to clear the names of the dead than to reap a
large settlement.

Robin
Lindley: Did the state breach its responsibility to keep citizens
safe?

Steve
Olson: Yes.
The danger zones to the west and northwest of the mountain were too
small, and the state was aware of that. In the week before the May
18 eruption, a concerted effort, led by local law enforcement
officials, was under way to expand the danger zone to the west, which
would have encompassed much of the area where the 57 victims were
killed. A proposal to do so was put on Dixy Lee Ray’s desk on
Saturday, May 17, but she was at a parade that weekend and did not go
to her office. The proposal was still sitting on her desk when the
volcano erupted Sunday morning.

Robin
Lindley: Mount St. Helens is now a national monument in part because
of the efforts of conservationists and environmentalists. Didn’t
commercial interests resist this designation? Can logging, mining or
other interests still exploit the monument?

Steve
Olson:
Weyerhaeuser and the other companies that owned land in the area
protected their interests, as would be expected. But they also
cooperated with the state and federal governments in establishing the
monument, exchanging land they owned inside the monument for land
outside the monument. Today, Weyerhaeuser is still logging the land
it owns around the monument, and exploratory shafts are still being
drilled on old mining claims, which could result in large open air
mines right on the border of the monument.

Robin
Lindley: You note that scientists have learned a great deal about
volcanoes and more from the Mount St. Helens’ eruption. What are
some of those lessons from this massive event?

Steve
Olson: For
one thing, public safety officials will never let people get so close
to a dangerous volcano, though every volcano is different, and they
all have the capacity to surprise. Scientifically, U.S. geologists
have been studying Mount St. Helens carefully ever since the eruption
and have learned much more about the signs that precede an eruption,
so much so that they have been able to predict every eruption of
Mount St. Helens that has occurred since that date. The technology is
also so much more sophisticated now than it was then, which has
further increased understanding of volcanic behavior.

Robin
Lindley: What have you been learning from your readers and people
acquainted with the story of the eruption since your book came out?

Steve
Olson:
People have been contacting me to tell me their stories of that day.
I haven’t yet heard of anything that would require me to make
changes in the paperback edition of the book, but I hope I do. I
tried to get the history just as accurate as I possibly could, but I
know that written histories are only an effort to get close to the
truth, not to capture it completely.

Robin
Lindley: Thanks Steve for your insights and thoughtful comments. And
congratulations on your groundbreaking and revelatory new book.